If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that
bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunk
without cease. But how? With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what
you please.Charles Baudelaire, ‘Enivrez-vous’ (‘Be drunk’ from Petits Poèmes en Prose, 1869)

It is very poignant that the final song in Henri Dutilleux’s last published piece, Le temps l’horloge
(‘Time and the Clock’), should be his only setting of Baudelaire; the
poet who had been perhaps the profoundest influence on his own,
passionately meticulous art. The state of drunkenness that Baudelaire
advocates is bittersweet, and Dutilleux’s rendering of these words into
music of remarkable colour, wit and dignity at the end of his long life
seems especially apt as summation. The entire, five-section cycle, also
setting words by Jean Tardieu and Robert Desnos, is a celebration of the
mystery of life shot through with the composer’s characteristic
ambivalence towards an ungraspable present and an unknowable future. On
the one hand, time is mechanical; a ticking clock inexorably pressing
forwards. On the other hand, time is an illusion, and nowhere is it more
tyrannical than in contemplation of the past, as memory becomes a kind
of haunting – the burden to which Baudelaire alludes. To enter or induce
a state of ecstacy – or drunkenness – is to free oneself from that
burden so that a deeper mystery may be apprehended. For Dutilleux, this
notion was not to do with wantonness but rather an artistic striving in
which, as he once put it to Roger Nichols (pictured below), ‘asceticism
has a distinct role to play, the artist has to renounce so many things,
so many pleasures; and in any case he’s not happy unless he can find the
opportunity to realise his true self.’

Eric Tanguy and Thierry Pécou both featured in the first half. Tanguy’s Affetuoso, ‘In memoriam Henri Dutilleux’
was written upon news of Dutilleux’s death in 2013, but seeks to honour
him through thanksgiving rather than grief. Building from a
chorale-like opening to a strongly three-in-a-bar, ‘affectionate’
tumult, Rophé drove the piece to its third and final climax with a
riotous orchestral blaze. By contrast, Pécou’s two-part Les liaisons magneétiques
(‘The Magnetic Connections’), closed the half in an idiom of
wide-ranging influence that owed as much to Milhaud and the Stravinsky
of The Soldier’s Tale as it did to more lyrical French writing.
Here the instrumentation comprised a chamber ensemble of six wind, two
percussion and nine strings, with a variety of grunts and growls off-set
by glissandi, harmonics and a pounding, animalistic bass drum.

Henri Dutilleux so nearly lived to see his 100th birthday, which
would have fallen on the exact day of this concert, January 22nd 2016.
But he died three years ago, in May 2013, and so we are left to honour
his centenary without him – and without that other distinguished,
long-lived French composer: Dutilleux’s nemesis, Pierre Boulez, who died
earlier this month aged 90. Of the two, seemingly antithetical,
figures, it is of course the latter who is far better known, and as much
for his brilliance as a conductor as for his youthful polemics,
institutional reach and uncompromising modernism. Yet Dutilleux, too,
was a fastidious composer, subjecting pieces to lengthy processes of
revision to the despair of publishers and commissioners. He too – albeit
far more overtly heir to Debussy and Ravel – shared an obsession with
matters timbral and textural and, in his own way, has proved highly
influential: it is notable, for instance, that his pupils should have
included the renowned ‘spectralist’, Gérard Grisey,* for whom the
fundamental, acoustic properties of sound (as opposed to, say,
mathematics or other underlying principles) were all-important creative
drivers.

In Dutilleux’s music, mystery and illusion abound; not simply as
atmosphere or ‘impressionist’ effect, but embedded deep within the
structure. Timbre and harmony become inextricably linked, for example,
so that it becomes hard to know precisely where one stops and the other
begins, especially in dense textures. Each of his two pieces in this
imaginative, beautifully performed ‘concert of two halves’ from the BBC
National Orchestra of Wales showed how Dutilleux’s chords shimmer with
overtones particular to his carefully chosen instrumental groupings,
creating layers of contrapuntal mirage. The first, Métaboles,
dates from 1962-4 and Dutilleux has described it as ‘where I [first]
succeeded in fully realising myself in music.’ Almost a concerto for
orchestra, the array of colours is astonishing as Dutilleux
‘metabolises’ or evolves his material through five, continuous but
distinctively orchestrated sections. Principal Conductor Thomas
Søndergård and his fine players rose to the work’s many challenges,
bringing an architectural sweep as well as attention to detail to the
evocatively titled ‘Incantatoire’, ‘Linéaire’, ‘Obsessionnel’ (this
incorporating a perhaps ironic nod to certain serial techniques),
‘Torpide’ and the final ‘Flamboyant’. The opening section’s unisons
alone might have proved exposing of tuning vagaries were not these
musicians so adept at listening and responding to one another.

The completion of works by deceased composers always raises issues of
authorial control, and no example has proved more contentious than that
of Mozart’s Requiem, famously left unfinished on the great
man’s untimely death in 1791. That this centenary celebration should be
headlined by a requiem might look odd on paper, but it was not
inappropriate following what amounts to the passing of an entire era of
postwar composers in recent years. Here, a downsized orchestra was
joined by a reduced BBC National Chorus of Wales (superbly primed by
Artistic Director, Adrian Partington) and four excellent soloists to
perform the most longlived version of Mozart’s swansong: by Franz Xaver
Süssmayr. Since the 1950s onwards brought increased scrutiny of his
efforts, poor Süssmayr has been scorned and reviled by many, only to
enjoy a recent rehabilitation: Stephen Oliver once wrote that ‘a
glow-worm would be a better composer’ than Mozart’s hapless pupil, and
that the Requiem has ‘the feel of a massive ancient cathedral
held together with bits of plastic’. By contrast, the Dunedin Consort’s
2014 reconstruction of the work’s first ever performance in David
Black’s edition of Süssmayr’s version has attracted wide acclaim.

Still from Miloš Formon’s 1984 film ‘Amadeus’
However, few listeners care about the wrangling of experts – just as
internecine contemporary-composer warfare passes them by. Regarding the
Mozart, they’d prefer simply to be moved, terrified, comforted and
ultimately uplifted by what they hear – and, for those in the packed St
David’s Hall, the BBC NOW did not disappoint. Søndergård’s tempi felt
spot-on and his balancing of the various forces was well judged in the
space, for all that the soloists were positioned behind the orchestra
and in front of the onstage chorus. In any case, the last-minute
inclusion of Rebecca Evans’ clear and lustrous soprano could not but
help elevate the performance to another plane. Mezzo, Jennifer Johnston;
tenor, Timothy Robinson and bass, Alastair Miles rose admirably to
match her unfussy artistry – which reached its culmination in a
magnificent Lux aeterna – as did the chorus with a delivery by
turns threatening and mournfully beseeching, but always clear and
vigorously sung. Of the orchestra, with its lovely strings and darkened
woodwind and brass, trombonist Donal Bannister deserves special mention
for his sonorous Tuba mirum duet with Miles.

From the processional grandeur of the Introitus and the Handel-inspired double fugue of the Kyrie, to the angst-ridden fury of the Dies Irae (so reminiscent of Don Giovanni’s casting into hell); the poignant lament of the Lachrimosa and the surging hope of the Agnus Dei, Mozart’s Requiem
combines a neo-baroque sensibility with a forward-looking, urgently
emotional drama. Whatever the truth surrounding its commissioning,
uncompleted writing and many subsequent versions, it has become lodged
in the popular mind as signifying the mystery of death itself. As BBC
NOW and the Cardiff University School of Music continue to celebrate the life and achievements of Dutilleux this spring,
it’s worth recalling that, however different in temperament he may have
been, the Frenchman shared with Mozart a profound humanism that wasn’t
reliant upon religious faith, but was deeply rooted in the resilience
of, and restless search for authenticity within, the human spirit.

Published as part of a Wales Arts Review tribute just after the death of David Bowie.

Fifty years ago, following the death of Edgar Varèse, Pierre Boulez wrote in tribute to the great man:
‘You have the deliberate wildness of the animal that does not go with
the herd, the rarity of the diamond in a unique mount … Your legend is
deeply rooted in our era; we can scrub the chalk (and water) circle of
those magic or ambiguous words “experimental”, “precursor”, “pioneer”…’

These words might equally apply to Boulez himself and, especially, to
David Bowie; both are recently deceased titans of contemporary culture
about whom I’m currently finding it hard to think without turning my
mind to the other – however unlikely that may sound, given their
differences. Boulez’ death (5 January) had already prompted reflection
on my own musical life, since my first amazement at the sensuous,
distilled beauty of Le marteau sans maître as a teenaged
guitarist-composer. In those days I was blithely unaware of any musical
‘rules’, and didn’t understand that high modernism and other kinds of
high fuck-off-ism represented by, say, punk rock, were not supposed to
mix. So I’ve felt a contradictory sadness, too, at both the fact and
passing of Boulez’ controversial era: that angry, damaged but brilliant
generation of postwar avant-garde composers, who so exquisitely yet
tyrannically held ‘new music’ hostage, and of whom Boulez was just about
the last representative (happily, Betsy Jolas, for one, is still with
us).

But, at age 90, and with his ill-health well known if unpublicised,
Boulez’ death was hardly a shock. How different was Bowie’s, coming
completely out of the blue, and just two days after the release of Blackstar on
January 8, his 69th birthday. The album and accompanying videos seemed
to me a return to superbly enigmatic, melancholy form. Boulez may have
been a thrilling discovery as a young musician, but I grew up with
Bowie. Until the Berlin years, and especially “Heroes” – I was
twelve when it came out in ’77 – it wasn’t so much his music that
grabbed me as his sheer, unapologetic otherness. Bowie’s eyes reminded
me of my mother’s following surgery for a detached retina. Except that
his felt curiously less alien than hers, regardless of his
sci-fi personas, and seemed to suggest infinitely greater understanding
of my own burgeoning, ambivalent sexuality.

Listening to ‘Lazarus’ on Blackstar, I’m reminded of the ironic spirit of “Heroes”
– and especially the fractured soundscapes of that album’s non-vocal
trilogy: ‘Sense of Doubt’, ‘Moss Garden’ and ‘Neuköln’. These were
imbued with what I imagined to be the defiant but flat-feeling decadence
of West Berlin during the Cold War – and they seemed to articulate a
kind of hollow yearning within my psyche, just as Boulez would later,
for a while, offer a jewelled respite from anguish.

Bowie showed us that identity can be what you make it. That the
binary opposites we fall into so unthinkingly – of high-low,
popular-serious (culture), male-female (gender), left-right (politics),
young-old (age) – are really only products of existential terror denied.
As Boulez pushed uncompromising extremes of the senses and synapses,
Bowie danced through them as shape-shifter extraordinaire; always and
never at home in his unique, ‘unbearable lightness of being’. That he
could share that with so many so profoundly – through music, art,
theatre, film, fashion, and now his own death – makes him a phenomenon I
doubt we’ll ever see the likes of again.

Monday, 18 April 2016

As music editor of Wales Arts Review, it’s
always heartening to get a sense of the sheer spirit of musical
endeavour and achievement across the country, mustered yearly in the
face of shrinking budgets – and across an ever-broadening spectrum of
genres from mainstream indie pop to the classical canon; from sonic art
to the post-minimal avant-garde. I’d like to extend thanks to the
directors who have written about their personal 2015 highlights for the Wales Arts Review classical music feature.
To add to theirs and our critics’ words, here are just a few of my own
stand-out events and performances from Wales and beyond. This year, I’m
focusing on contemporary music and/or new productions:

Firstly, the wonderfully ambitious culmination of Mark Bowden’s
composer’s residency with the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales
in A Violence of Gifts;
a work which saw the composer successfully join forces with another,
major Welsh creative voice in poet Owen Sheers – and at a time when
large-scale orchestral commissions everywhere are becoming increasingly
rare.

On that point, the continued re-invigoration of Tŷ Cerdd, Music
Centre Wales, is proving greatly positive for the future health of Welsh
and Wales-based contemporary work: 2015 saw the announcement that the
International Society for Contemporary Music has admitted Wales as a
full national member for the first time. The ensuing range of benefits
to be afforded via the new ISCM Wales
will be unfolded over the coming months and years, and will include the
offer for Welsh composers to submit scores alongside other nations for
international performance through the ISCM platform.Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
In May, visiting Estonians showed how a relatively small nation can
find ways to safeguard and encourage their composers and musicians,
often against the odds. At the internationally renowned Vale of
Glamorgan Festival, the Talinn Chamber Orchestra and Estonian
Philharmonic Chamber Choir presented three generations of composers
from this proud Baltic State as featured composer, Arvo Pärt, was
celebrated in his 80th birthday year. Also featured in 2015 was the
British-Bulgarian composer, Dobrinka Tabakova, and we were lucky to have
her in residence for key days of the festival. It was a great
opportunity to hear a cross-section of her beautifully wrought music
which, like Pärt’s but in its own, unique way, bridges worlds of the
ancient and modern.

Back to BBC NOW, the annual Composition: Wales event is going from strength to strength each spring under conductor Jac van Steen – and this autumn saw Huw Watkins
become the orchestra’s new Composer in Residence. Watkins will no doubt
help the continued drive to encourage Welsh contemporary music, and it
will be intriguing to see what further performance and education
projects he is able to support alongside Composition: Wales as his own
music receives deserved, increased exposure.BBC NOW at the BBC Proms 2015, conducted by Xian Zhang
BBC NOW has recently made history as the first BBC orchestra ever to
appoint a woman in a titled position: the Chinese conductor, Xian Zhang,
will be a welcome, frequent visitor in Wales as the orchestra’s new
Principal Guest Conductor following her successful concert with BBC NOW
at the BBC Proms in July 2015. Welsh audiences will, of course, know
Zhang from her more recent appearances with the Welsh National Opera
orchestra, having made her pit debut with the company to great acclaim with Nabucco in 2014.

Yet again, Welsh National Opera proved a source of inspiration and
world-class achievement in 2015 (watch out for two new commissions to
come next year for their 70th anniversary: Figaro gets a Divorce by Elena Langer and In Parenthesis by Iain Bell, which will also commemorate World War I).WNO Pelléas and Mélisande, credit Clive Barda
Last spring, Artistic Director David Pountney’s new production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande
was both searingly intelligent and ravishingly beautiful, aided by an
exceptional cast, and with stunning orchestral colour provided by the
WNO Orchestra under Lothar Koenigs’ baton. Director Annalise Miskimmon
went on to score a further, perhaps less likely, hit at WNO with her
courageous production of I puritani for WNO’s ‘madness’ season.
Here – in all too timely a fashion – it was not simply the heroine but
the fact of war that was held to be insane, as Miskimmon and her team
cast Bellini’s Roundheads and Cavaliers as warring Protestants and
Catholics in 1970s Belfast.
Staying with opera but moving further afield, I have to flag up the recent world premiere of Morgen und Abend by Georg Friedrich Haas at London’s Royal Opera House.RO Morgen und Abend, credit Clive Barda
It’s always encouraging to see new work commissioned for the main
stage at Covent Garden (the last was Mark-Anthony Turnage’s noisily
kitsch Anna Nicole, some four years ago), and Haas delivered in
anticipated beguiling fashion. His music is known for hovering on that
elusive, noumenal brink where sound becomes colour and vice versa. Here
it took on yet further dimensions in Graham Vick’s intriguing,
bleached-bare production, in an opera which explored life, death and the
continuum between the two as viewed from inside/outside, beyond the
grave (and, yes, the Beckett inference is deliberate).

As memorable as this was, however, my highlight beyond Wales was
another opera directed by Vick; this time at his own Birmingham Opera
Company, who win plaudits for bringing off in superb style an audacious,
seemingly impossible project combining professional soloists and
musicians with a chorus of local volunteers – who learned their
challenging parts by ear.

Thirty-eight years ago, Tippett’s complex fourth opera premiered to
the rolling of many critics’ eyes. Scorned as a sixties-fuelled,
over-earnest attempt to get down with the kids, the visceral integrity
and sheer social relevance of the work has largely been overlooked –
until this year. Finally, The Ice Break was given the
production it deserves, showing how a visionary staging at the right
time and in the right venue can – if only in some cases and for a
one-off event – prove redemptive of works once dismissed as failures.BOC The Ice Break, credit Adam Fradgley
In Vick’s cleverly choreographed, industrial warehouse setting, none
of us were innocent bystanders. Sited amongst the jostling, mob chorus,
we swayed with their mood: now adoring the doomed black champion,
Olympion (sung by Ta’u Pupu’a), now racist and hating as black and white
went berserk in post-Handsworth, post-Ferguson riot. Intimate pains of
love and inter-generational conflict were etched against a background of
political struggle as the once-exiled Lev (Andrew Slater) was reunited
with his dying wife, Nadia (Nadine Benjamin) and damaged son, Yuri (Ross
Ramgobin).

The cast sang and acted superbly, allied with conductor Andrew
Gourlay’s excellent City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which
revealed the hitherto clouded brilliance of Tippett’s uncompromising
score. While Stephanie Corley’s Gayle and Chrystal E. Williams’s Hannah
made sacrifices – one fatally, the other in renewal – ultimately,
breaking the ice was shown to mean breaking down barriers. As Tippett
intended, and as this production powerfully showed, the challenge
remains vital, exhilarating – and urgent.

Since Remembrance Sunday on November 8th, the people of Beirut and
Paris have once again been forced in appalling fashion to join the
myriads around the world who are mourning their dead and injured at the
hands of madmen in thrall to a death-cult. At a time when millions are
fleeing atrocities and the ravaging of their ancient civilisations,
questions about the preservation, celebration and sharing of culture
inevitably take on a more urgent significance – not least in the light
of attacks deliberately aimed at artists, writers and now
concert-goers.*

It is not so easy to separate music from world events or politics as
some would prefer. Of the eight pieces featured in this impressively
performed BBC National Chorus of Wales concert of Welsh and Patagonian
composers, three had a timely, outright connection with war. A fourth – We Have Found a Better Land
by Mark Bowden, here receiving its world premiere – marked a
contemporary response to the stories of those who left Wales 150 years
ago on board the tea-clipper Mimosa in an ironic, but
ultimately successful, attempt to preserve their cultural heritage and
identity. Crucially, following a research visit to Patagonia, Bowden
interwove these stories with tales of the indigenous Tehuelche people
who helped to ensure the survival of what, to them, would have been
strange, alien incomers from some unimaginable, distant land – before
themselves being subject to genocide by marauding Argentinian military
during the 1870s ‘Conquest of the Desert’.An early settler in Patagonia with people of the Tehuelche. Catrin Rogers.
Bowden’s a cappella, sixteen-minute piece, performed in the second half, contains strong resonances of the folk-creation themes featured in A Violence of Gifts,
and showed the further evolution of this thoughtful vocal composer in
its six sections, balancing narrative and description through an
imaginative use of solos, semi-chorus and divisi SATB. Bowden
compiled the text from various diaries, letters, stories and poems which
together paint a vivid picture of hope, disappointment and change
against a suitably ambivalent geopolitical backdrop. Most affecting were
his quietly unsettling dissonance – with the singers doing well to
negotiate unfamiliar chords – and the quasi-antiphonal passages which
detailed the uncertain progress of the voyage itself (Section 2),
followed by the discovery that ‘The region is nothing like we read or
heard. We have been told tremendous lies’ (Section 4).

As Bowden captures very well, one of the most deeply embedded human
instincts at times of shared disaster, joy or fear is to join together
in song, and Wales is justly famous for the robust choral tradition
which has sustained its industrial and rural communities for
generations. However, notwithstanding a frustrating general tendency to
ghettoise performances of ‘Welsh composers’ rather than simply integrate
them in everyday programming, none of those featured this evening were
or are nationalist in any narrow sense, nor restricted to clichéd ideas
of tradition; indeed, in various ways, each reflects an international as
well as more domestic outlook.

The work that proved most directly poignant post-Beirut and Paris was Geraint Lewis’s The Souls of the Righteous,
which was originally composed for the memorial service of William
Mathias at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1992. Here – so soon after July this
year, when the piece was performed at St Paul’s to mark the 10th
anniversary of the 7/7 bombings – it transcended any religious context
to convey a universal dignity in sorrow courtesy of some fine, heartfelt
singing from the assembled Chorus; and this despite the odd, too-brisk
tempo adopted by conductor and NCW artistic director, Adrian Partington.

Lewis’s piece came at the close of the first half, following a pair
of equally brief, but more celebratory 1980s psalm-settings by late
friends and colleagues, Alun Hoddinott and Mervyn Burtch, which framed
the most substantial work of the evening, Grace Williams’s 1973 Ave maris stella. Burtch’s Psalm 150
(1989) was the more extrovert in both character and performance; its
bouncing, quirkily rhythmic piano part contrasting with the organ’s
underlying portentousness in Hoddinott’s Sing a New Song (1985), which opened the concert. Between the pieces a semi-chorus stepped forward to perform the challenging Ave maris with such confidence as to make it easy to forget that the BBC NCW remains an amateur choir.

In a sense, Williams – like any Welsh composer who has struggled to
find a foothold in a London-based establishment – found herself dealing
with politics of a kind by default. As a woman in a male-dominated
world, though uncomplaining, she found it harder still to be taken
seriously and, whilst highly respected by her colleagues and by
musicians today, she remains relatively unknown and vastly underrated.
Though she eschewed the radicalism of serial composers, which she found
‘incredibly strange’ and counter to her essentially melodic impulses,
she heard other music whilst studying with Wellesz in 1930s Vienna which
undoubtedly left its mark. Like many of her works, the Ave maris
belies the apparent accessibility of its romantic surface, with
intense, sustained harmonic processes that need coaxing, as it were,
from the inner voices outwards. Here, the semi-chorus proved highly
capable despite Partington’s reluctance to allow Williams’s seascape to
roil and surge as passionately as it might have, given greater room to
breathe.

Of further works this evening, Héctor MacDonald’s Clyw ein Lief, O lôr
(‘Hear my Prayer, O Lord’: choir joined by organ and trumpet) was a
further chance for audiences to hear this fourth-generation Welsh
composer from Chubut province in Patagonia, whilst Paul Mealor’s In Flanders Fields
extended the remembrance theme to that earlier site of atrocities in
World War I, a centenary ago. War – and the hideous slaughter of
children and innocents that it always entails – also formed the subject
of the final work of the programme; at twenty minutes the longest, and
the toughest in musical idiom, charting a journey from anguish to
renewal.London during the Blitz.
This was William Mathias’s Ceremony After a Fire Raid, a
setting of Dylan Thomas’s famous poem from the London Blitz, written in
response to seeing a charred baby lying dead on a bombed-out street. Of
his setting, Mathias wrote, ‘Although inspired by the Second World War,
the poem’s meaning (for me) is reflected in events closer to our time.’
What these were he did not specify, but renewed bombing from the IRA
following Bloody Sunday (1972) can hardly have been far from his
thoughts – nor indeed the Vietnam War, with Nixon finally calling
ceasefire on that tragedy in 1973, the year he composed the piece. Cast
in three, continuous sections, it carries traces of the Stravinsky of Les Noces
in its spiky vocal lines and bold, additional parts for percussion and
piano – as well as (albeit mildly) reflecting the decade’s
music-theatrical experimentalism, encapsulated by Peter Maxwell Davies
and others.

It was in this work that Partington felt most at ease, leading the
choir in vigorous rendition of Mathias’s whispers, chants and
full-voiced quasi-expressionism. Some of the work’s gestures sound dated
today – the circling glock and xylophone motifs, for instance, and the
extended ‘drum solo’. But the integrity of the piece is undoubted in
response to the kind of entirely self-made horror which humanity even
now seems unable to avoid repeating.

* not to mention less well-publicised western acts of barbarism and
hypocrisy such as the American hospital bombing in Kunduz, and the
ignoring of the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied
territories.

The concert was recorded for a forthcoming Tŷ Cerdd CD, as well as future broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

Earlier this month, on October 7 2015, Rachel Podger became the tenth
recipient – and the first woman – to be awarded the highly prestigious
Bach Prize at the Royal Academy of Music, where she is Micaela Comberti
Chair of Baroque Violin. The annual award recognises an individual who
has made an outstanding contribution to J.S Bach performance and/or
scholarship. Needless to say, following a lifetime of dedication, Bach
remains the cornerstone of Podger’s exquisite artistry. In June, she led
a joint RAM/Juilliard School venture which included a concert of Bach’s
music in Leipzig as part of the city’s 2015 Bachfest. How fitting,
then, that her very own Brecon Baroque Festival should celebrate its
tenth anniversary this year with a focus on Bach, and on Leipzig in
particular, where the mature Bach wrote some of his greatest works.

Rachel Podger. Credit: Jonas Sacks
Bach was Cantor in Leipzig for 27, sometimes stormy, always
hard-pressed, years between 1723 and 1750. The first major event for
which he was tasked with producing music was Good Friday, 1724, when the
resulting St John Passion was performed in liturgical sequence
as part of a church service. In Brecon, nearly 300 years later, the
piece launched Podger’s festival at the town’s cathedral – which happens
to be dedicated to St John the Evangelist. Perhaps the chamber
instrumental ensemble and somewhat larger church choir gathered on this
occasion might reflect the scale of forces available to Bach in Leipzig –
although the great man would no doubt be stunned by the modern players’
virtuosity.* At any rate, Podger’s exceptional Brecon Baroque players
(here comprising double flutes and oboes, with bassoon, minimal strings
and organ continuo) were joined with admirable spirit by the 43-strong
Choirs of Brecon Cathedral, including local schoolchildren, and an array
of superb soloists of varying international experience and renown.

It is the Evangelist who bears the greatest burden in the St John
as narrator of Jesus’s harrowing journey to the cross, which Christians
seem to find so paradoxically liberating. The ambivalence lies at the
heart of Bach’s magnificent, oratorio-like drama which, through a
succession of recitatives and arias, choruses, chorales and quick-fire
exchanges, ultimately views the crucifixion through the lens of Christ’s
joyfully anticipated resurrection. The tenor, Nils Giebelhausen, proved
ardently capable in what is an extremely demanding, exposed role; only
occasionally showing signs of vocal pushing as he guided the
‘congregation’ from the pulpit through nearly two hours of highly
charged, descriptive story-telling – and sang the contrastingly
plaintive tenor arias from the floor to boot.

Giebelhausen was ably supported with brisk pace-setting from the
conductor, Mark Duthie, Brecon cathedral’s organist and choral director,
who steered the choral sections with unassuming skill and a clear sense
of direction. In places there were hints of inflexibility, where
greater looseness of tempo would have helped articulate Bach’s dense
polyphony and finely calibrated emotions; there was untidy haste, for
example, in ‘Eilt, ihr angefochtnen Seelen’ and the final chorus, ‘Ruht
wohl’, intended as a balm. However, this is a minor quibble. Overall,
the performance had a stirring combination of devotional pathos and
earthy brio, and the choir sang with combined accuracy and fervour.
Indeed, it would have been wonderful to hear them in their true
substance, perhaps raised by some means above the height of the
ensemble, which they had no choice but to stand behind in the
cathedral’s slender nave.

The other soloists were well-matched in the acoustic and sang with
zeal. Nicholas Gedge – who grew up in Brecon, where Podger has lived for
some fifteen years – brought grave dignity to the role of Jesus,
balanced by the imperiousness of his fellow bass, Giles Underwood, who
emerged in Part II to sing a blood-freezing Pilate and contrasting,
soulful ariosos.

As good as these were, the high points came at places of especially
intense vocal and instrumental interaction, as countertenor, Robin
Blaze, and soprano, Alison Hill, took turns to deliver some ravishing
arias, each one accompanied by a different combination of woodwind and
strings. Throughout, the ensemble, led by Podger on baroque violin and
viola d’amore, played with pellucid feeling for Bach’s harmonic shifts
and suspensions. Blaze, currently impressing in Welsh National Opera’s Orlando,
interwove lovely ornamentation with the delicate oboes in ‘Von der
Stricken’ and, together with Alison McGillivray’s consummately mournful
cello, brought the work to its wrenching climax at ‘Es ist vollbracht!’.
Meanwhile, Hill and the two flutes made a sound to soften the very
stones of the building in her first aria, ‘Ich folge dir’; oboe was
added for Part II’s keening ‘Zerfliesse, mein Herze’ at the death of
Christ.

If only Bach had written more for these solo vocal parts in his
subsequent revisions of the work. But, for all the adverse comparison to
1727’s lengthier, more intellectually weighty St Matthew Passion – not to mention more recent controversies regarding supposed anti-Semitism in the libretto** – Bach’s St John Passion
remains one of the great pinnacles of the sacred canon. Surely fewer
openings anywhere can match the sustained hair-raising of ‘Herr, unser
Herrscher’ which, in its combined immediacy and layered, theological
tension, throws down the expressive gauntlet for the ensuing drama.
Brecon Baroque stayed true to both aspects – and presented the work in a
community context which made it all the more intimate and inclusive.

* In 1730, Bach ruefully observed of the professional musicians
supplied by Leipzig Town Council: ‘Modesty forbids me to speak at all
truthfully of their qualities and musical knowledge. Nevertheless it
must be remembered that they are partly emeriti and partly not at all in such exercitio as they should be.’

** Richard Taruskin, for example, has condemned the St John
for portraying the Jews alone as guilty of deicide, although Michael
Marissen has pointed to evidence that Bach did nothing to emphasise any
anti-Judaic sentiment in the original text, which is of unclear
authorship, but based on the Gospel According to St John, 18-19.

There are many fallacies wrapped up in our love affair with the idea
of a pantheon of ‘great composers’, and they are often contradictory.
For instance, we continue to rate the importance of composers from
history according to their success in forging influential new paths,
while snubbing those of our own time who are deemed experimental. And
yet few composers actively set out to blaze a trail, and some of the
most popular and enduring have shown little interest in innovation per se.
Of the five, diverse composers featured in this BBC National Orchestra
of Wales season-opener in Cardiff, three may be cited as cases in point:
Elgar, Rachmaninov and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s newly
appointed, brilliantly accomplished Composer in Association, Huw Watkins, for whom the evening was in part an official welcome and introduction.

The concert offered a generous, off-beat stylistic sweep, balancing
the overtly populist with an intense main event in Rachmaninov’s The Bells, and bringing together Russian and British composers from the late 19th century to the present day. Stravinsky’s Fireworks
(1908) opened proceedings with a short, celebratory flare of colour
under Principal Conductor, Thomas Søndergård. Composed as a wedding
present to the daughter of his beloved teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, the
Stravinsky is really a piece of slightly wonky juvenilia, chiefly
important as a sketch for his lush first ballet, The Firebird.*

Huw Watkins. Photo credit: www.operaomnia.co.uk
Watkins’ London Concerto which followed was equally, if more
quietly, dazzling in its orchestral palette – but proved far more
substantial in breadth and disciplined invention. Cast in five movements
as a kind of concerto grosso or sinfonia concertante, the work was
named for its 2005 centenary commissioners, the London Symphony
Orchestra, but has had to wait until now for its deserved second
performance. No doubt this is partly due to the unusualness of its
engaging solo trio of violin, bassoon and harp (persuasively played by
Malin Broman, Rachel Gough and Hannah Stone). Watkins’ handling of form
was particularly impressive, with a dynamic and, at times, welcomingly
astringent use of harmony coupled with strong contrapuntal writing. With
two movements devoted to orchestra alone, many fascinating partnerships
unfolded between the soloists and orchestral players to create a
tapestry which would reward repeated listenings without losing its
direct appeal.

The other London piece of the concert was Elgar’s characterful Cockaigne Overture
(1900-01), which opened the second half. Here, Søndergård conveyed a
sense of proportion and restrained lyricism, but skated thinly over the
score’s latent ambivalence and volcanic fire. Whilst Elgar is too often
wrongly pigeon-holed as stiff and heavy with the ‘nobilmente’
designation he used for the first time in this score (sketches for
the ‘Enigma’ Variations aside), here the performance also gave few hints of Elgar’s equal weight and wry sparkle. Ironically, following its premiere, Cockaigne
had been dismissed by the critic Charles Maclean as having ‘an excess
of fancy’ and paying ‘too little attention to form’. But perhaps we have
all the grounds we need to dismiss such remarks as callow regression
from one who also opined that women’s suffrage was a ‘truly nefarious
cause’.

Seated high up behind the orchestra, the BBC National Chorus of Wales
sat patiently awaiting their two daunting encounters with the Russian
language. The first – the ‘Polvtsian Dances’ from Borodin’s unfinished
opera, Prince Igor – drew cheers from the audience in closing
the first half. However, it was the second which drew greater Slavic
vocal character from the eager massed forces, in the form of
Rachmaninov’s magnificent choral symphony. The Bells was
written in 1912-13, on the cusp of World War I, and the 1917 October
Revolution which would sweep the Bolsheviks to power in Russia and
precipitate the bourgeois Rachmaninov’s flight from his motherland,
never to return.

The tolling of bells and the intoning of the Dies Irae
held enormous significance for Rachmaninov, and both come together in
this secular setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s intense, brooding poem in
Konstantin Balmont’s narrative translation. As the chorus and orchestra
dug deep, Søndergård deftly steered their journey from the light ‘Silver
Sleigh Bells’ of the 1st movement to the dark, ‘Mournful Iron Bells’ of
the final 4th with the aid of three superb soloists: soprano, Anastasia
Kalagina; tenor, John Daszak; and the wonderfully reverberant bass,
Mikhail Petrenko. Together – and with the exquisite lament of
Sarah-Jayne Porsmoguer’s cor anglais – they lent solemn authority to a
performance which proved, appropriately enough, the ringing highlight of
the evening.

* It will be interesting to see what, if any, resemblance Fireworks
passes to a piece Stravinsky wrote for an entirely more sombre purpose
in Rimsky’s funeral, 1909: long thought lost, the work has recently been
discovered in the form of a set of orchestral parts found in the
library of the St Petersburg Conservatoire.

This performance formed part of a Cardiff-wide celebration of
Rachmaninov spanning BBC NOW to the Welsh National Opera and
Philharmonia orchestras, St David’s Hall to the Royal Welsh College of
Music and Drama.